THE AET OF CEITICISM 199 Eobertson, as we saw, although he dissipates Jesus in the Gospels into a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, never¬ theless is so impressed by the Pauline " references to a crucified Jesus" (p. 364) that he resuscitates Jesus Ben Pandira out of the limbo of the Talmud. Perhaps he strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel. Anyhow, I wUl leave Mr. Smith to settle accounts with him, and turn to a fresh point, which has not occurred to either of them. It is this. Adonis and Osiris were never regarded by ''f°Q^* their votaries as having been human beings that had tian belief recently lived and died on the face of this earth. The '^th^^^t Christians, in strong contrast with them and with all of Adonis other pagans ever heard of, did so regard Jesus from °^ ^""^^ first to last. Why so, when they knew that from the first he was a God and up in heaven ? Why has the fact of his unreality, as these writers argue it, left no trace of itself in Christian tradition and literature ? According to this new school of critics, the Nazarenes, when they wrote down the Gospels, knew perfectly well that Jesus was a figment, and had never lived at all. And yet we never get a hint that he was only a myth, and that the New Testament is a giganticfumisterie. Why so ? Why from the very first did the followers of Jesus entertain what Mr. Smith denounces as " an a priori concept of the Jesus " (p. 35) ? Why, in other words, were they convinced from the beginning that he was a man of flesh and blood, who had lived on earth among them? The "early secrecy," the " esoterism of the primitive cult" (p. 39), says Mr. Smith, " was intended to be only temporary." If so, why could not the Nazarenes, primarily interested as they were, not in lies and bogus, but in disseminating their lofty monotheism, have thrown